Month: February 2015

England’s oldest cannonball found on battlefield

Medieval

A lead ball discovered on farmland that is part of the English Heritage-registered historic site of the Battle of Northampton is believed to be the oldest known surviving cannonball in England, fired at the War of the Roses battle on July 10th, 1460. The ball was first discovered near Eagle Drive, Northampton, some years ago by Stuart Allwork, the late owner of the farm, but was thought to have been lost. Mr. Allwork died in 2013; last year the cannonball was rediscovered in his house. Since then, the projectile has been analyzed in detail by Dr. Glenn Foard, the battlefield archaeologist who led the successful search for the true location of the Battle of Bosworth.

Lead shot is disproportionately valuable to historians because it doesn’t corrode as quickly as steel and iron and can therefore be subjected to forensic ballistic examination that tells its story. The ball is about three inches in diameter and bears the scars of its use in battle. It is misshapen and gouged, impact damage from at least two bounces after it was fired. It may also have hit a tree. Particles of Northampton Sand (a subterranean geological formation that was once a shallow sea) and ironstone were found inside one of the deep gouges, evidence of how deep into the field the ball was driven and that it was used in the Northampton area.

[Dr. Foard] said: “It is highly likely that the projectile was fired during the battle in 1460”.

“I have worked with all the lead and lead composite (i.e. lead balls containing a piece of iron or stone, or many fragments of stone) round shot from battlefields of the 15th and 16th centuries that have, as far as I know, been reported from any battlefields in the UK and also those from several siege sites.

“With this knowledge I can say that this lead round from Northampton is indeed a ‘cannonball’ and that it has been fired (there is distinctive firing evidence) and has impacted with stone in the ground.”

Historical accounts of the Battle of Northampton refer to the use of artillery on the field, or more specifically, the failure of artillery. It was raining hard when the Yorkists under Richard “Kingmaker” Neville, Earl of Warwick, advanced on the forces of King Henry VI. The Lancastrians attempted to fire cannons at their opponents, but the driving rain entirely disabled the artillery. If those sources are accurate, that would mean the Eagle Drive ball was shot from a Yorkist cannon. When Neville’s troops reached the Lancastrian defenses on the left flank, the Yorkists holding the line laid down their weapons by order of their commander Lord Grey of Ruthin who had cut a deal with Neville to betray the king in return for support in a land dispute.

The battle was over 30 minutes later, the king captured and thousands of his troops killed either by Yorkist hand or by drowning in the River Nene during their retreat. The result of this rout was the Act of Accord which made Richard, Duke of York, heir to the throne. Henry’s wife Margaret of Anjou had no intention of meekly acceding to the disinheriting of their son, so she rallied the troops and kept the war going. Richard died in battle in December of 1460, less than two months after the Act of Accord had made him Prince of Wales. His son would become King Edward IV, the first Yorkist King of England, less than three months after that in March of 1461.

The site of the Battle of Northampton was added to the English Heritage Register of Battlefields in 1995. Few artifacts from the fight have been discovered because the field is vast — 187 hectares — and hasn’t been archaeologically excavated. Just three possible lead shots have been found and the Eagle Drive cannonball is the only one to have been thoroughly studied so that its identity as a medieval cannonball could be confirmed.

Portrait attributed to Leonardo seized from Swiss bank vault

Looting, Modern(ish), Renaissance

Italian financial police and the Carabinieri art theft squad teamed up with Swiss federal authorities Monday to seize a painting some believe to be a lost portrait of Isabella d’Este by Leonardo da Vinci from a bank vault in Lugano, Switzerland. Clandestine sale negotiations were ongoing when the police nabbed the work. The top asking price was 120 million euros ($135.9 million). Prosecutor Manfredi Palumbo said at a press conference that there are 70 people of interest in this investigation, all potentially part of a large illegal art smuggling ring attempting to move multiple works out of Italy into the black market.

The painting was found as a result of a fortuitous encounter during an unrelated investigation last August. The finance police in Pesaro, a town on the northeast coast of Italy in the Marche region, were looking into an insurance fraud case when they discovered documents indicating the portrait was in Switzerland. The finance police teamed up with the Carabinieri and tracked down the painting in the private vault of a Lugano trust. There’s some raw footage of the bust here. All that teal makes for a pretty sad looking Swiss bank vault.

This isn’t the paintings first sojourn in a Swiss vault. When the news of it first emerged in October of 2013, the portrait was one of 400 artworks kept in a Swiss bank by an anonymous Italian family who claimed the collection had been in Switzerland since the early 20th century. Completely unpublished and undocumented, of course, because that’s how Swiss private collections like it. Family lore whispered of it being Leonardo’s portrait of Isabelle d’Este so finally around 2009 or so, likely in advance of sale, they began intensive research on the piece. Radiocarbon dating found that the work was painted between 1460 and 1650; X-ray fluorescence found that the primer and pigments are consistent with those used by the Renaissance master. UCLA emeritus art history professor and Leonardo expert Carlo Pedretti enthusiastically authenticated the portrait as Leonardo’s work.

The question of whether Leonardo ever painted a portrait of Isabella d’Este has been much debated by art historians over the centuries. In December of 1499, Leonardo da Vinci fled Milan after the city was conquered by the French and his patron Duke Ludovico Sforza was overthrown. On the way to Venice, he stopped in Mantua where he was welcomed by Isabella d’Este, wife of Francesco II Gonzaga, Marquess of Mantua, who had met the artist at the double wedding where she married Francesco and her sister Beatrice d’Este married Ludovico Sforza. (Leonardo had actually designed some costumes for a joust held as part of the wedding celebrations.) He wasn’t in town for long, but Leonardo did make the time to draw a portrait of Isabella in black, red, white and ochre chalk on paper. He made at least two sketches of her portrait profile. One he took with him to Venice; the other he gave to Isabella’s husband Francesco Gonzaga. Multiple letters from Isabella to Leonardo asking him to make a painting from the sketch have survived, but there is no evidence that he ever did so. Isabella also asked him to make her another drawing after her husband gave hers away in 1501, but there’s no evidence he did that either. The sketch Leonardo gave to Gonzaga is now lost. The sketch he brought with him is now in the permanent collection of the Louvre.

The discovery of an oil painting undeniably modeled after the drawing sparked much discussion as other experts disagreed with Pedretti’s attribution. One glaring issue is that the portrait is on canvas while Leonardo and his school used wood panels. This would be the only known work he ever did on canvas. It’s also a remarkably accurate match to the sketch considering that it was ostensibly painted years after the drawing was done (Pedretti posits that it was painted in 1514 when Leonardo met Isabella again in Rome). Then there are the quality concerns. Parts of it — the crown and that atrocious palm frond she’s holding — are clearly not the work of the master.

Just to add another layer of labyrinthine complexity to this case, recall that the news of the Isabella portrait broke in the Corriere della Sera’s Sette magazine the first week of October, 2013. Less than two months earlier on August 27th, 2013, Pesaro police received a tip that a local lawyer, Sergio Shawo, was found in possession of a letter from one Emidia Cecchini, the 70-year-old putative owner of the portrait, in which she exhorts him to sell the painting for no less than 95 million euros ($107 million). By Italian law, all art works more than 50 years old cannot leave Italy without a special export license and there was no license pertaining to the portrait. Pesaro authorities asked their Swiss colleagues to execute a search warrant on the Swiss bank vault where the painting was believed to be kept, but they were unable to find it there.

So when all the big publicity about this incredible find in the Swiss vault was going down with the dueling experts and the lab testing and all that, as far as authorities were concerned at least, the painting was actively on the lam. Police suspected it had been smuggled back into Italy in a dastardly game of keep-away, and indeed it may have been before returning to Switzerland the next year where it cropped up in that insurance fraud case.

The painting is still in Switzerland for now where it will stay until legal ownership can be determined. Cecchini, the nice old lady in reduced circumstances whose grandparents put together so fine an art collection, may be the legitimate owner trying to win the lottery by the illegal export and sale of her property, or that whole 400 paintings in a Swiss vault since the early 1900s story may be a complete and total fabrication to cover an art smuggling conspiracy. Two art dealers are under investigation for involvement in this case, and they were looking to sell other Old Master works at the same time.

Once ownership is established, the Italian authorities want the painting back in Italy. Until then, additional authentication research is on hold.

Magna Carta found in Kent library scrapbook

Medieval, Modern(ish), Museums

An exemplar of the 1300 edition of Magna Carta has been discovered in a Victorian-era scrapbook in the Kent History and Library Centre in Maidstone, Kent, southeast England. The newly discovered parchment is almost two feet long, but it is not in good condition. Moisture has claimed about a third of the document — a vertical strip down the middle is gone — and the royal seal of King Edward I is missing. Still, with so few exemplars surviving (there are only seven of the 1300 issue), even a damaged one is an exceptional find.

The document was discovered by Dr. Mark Bateson, Kent County Council’s community history officer, while he was looking for another medieval royal charter at the behest of University of East Anglia professor Nicholas Vincent, Principal Investigator for the Magna Carta Project, a wide-ranging study of the seminal charter limiting the rights of kings in anticipation of the 800th anniversary of its issue by King John at Runnymede on June 15th, 1215. Vincent asked Bateson to look up Sandwich’s original copy of the Charter of the Forest, a complementary charter to Magna Carta asserting public rights of access to royal forests first issued by John’s son King Henry III on November 6th, 1217. As the Kent History and Library Centre contains the county’s historic archives, a vast treasury of almost 9 miles of historical documents going back as far as 699 A.D., Bateson searched there for the Forest Charter.

He found it pressed in a scrapbook put together by E. Salisbury, a British Museum official, in the late 19th century. This particular edition of the Charter of the Forest was issued to Sandwich in 1271. Turning the page, Bateson saw another medieval parchment and recognized it as Magna Carta. The 1300 issue date was still visible at the bottom of the page. Professor Vincent authenticated it as genuine from its layout, the handwriting of the scribe and the details of the text which match the other surviving 1300 Magna Cartas.

Since King John was made to sign the first issue by his rebellious barons in 1215, Magna Carta was reissued multiple times to affirm and modify the enumerated rights. The 1300 reissue was the last to be distributed under the king’s seal, and the fact that Sandwich received a copy may indicate Magna Carta was more widely distributed to smaller towns and ports than previously thought. Sandwich was one of the Cinque Ports, a confederation of five coastal towns who maintained fleets of ships for the monarch in return for tax breaks and a number of self-government rights. Richard the Lionheart landed in Sandwich in 1194 upon his return to England after the extortionate ransom demanded by his captor, Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor, was paid. The only other Cinque Ports town known to have a copy of Magna Carta is Faversham. Professor Vincent hopes the discovery of the Sandwich Magna Carta may be an indication that other small towns could have one of their own squirreled away in their archives.

The fact that Sandwich has originals of both the 1300 Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest in its archives is exceptionally rare. Only one other institution, Oriel College, Oxford, has the same pair. The two go together like the proverbial horse and carriage, historically speaking. The Charter of the Forest was issued to expand upon the forest law references in Magna Carta, like a Forest Bill of Rights to Magna Carta’s Constitution. Since avid hunter William the Conqueror first established a separate forest law to keep people from messing with his personal game preserve, lands declared royal forest had expanded greatly, especially under King Richard and King John. The Plantagenet kings had claimed ever more land, some of it not even wooded but rather moor or pasture land or even villages, as royal forest and forbade traditional customs like the use of forests as common land for grazing, fishing, collecting firewood, foraging or cultivating subsistence crops. The Charter of the Forest restored these rights to free men and abolished the death penalty for taking the king’s venison. Magna Carta deals with the rights of barons, so the Forest Charter is actually the first charter to protect the rights of the regular people from aristocratic overreach.

The Charter of the Forest also bears the honor of being the cause for the coining of the epic name “Magna Carta.” The term was first used in a 1218 proclamation to distinguish the “Great Charter” from its smaller and more focused relation, the Forest Charter. In 1297, Edward I issued the two charters together in the Confirmatio Cartarum, or Confirmation of Charters, to pacify yet more unruly barons who were mad at him for taxing them. It’s of note that Sandwich received both charters even though the county of Kent had no royal forest. It suggests the two went out together as a team no matter the destination.

This is obviously a banner year for Magna Carta enthusiasts. Last week, the four surviving exemplars of the 1215 Magna Carta came together for the first time in a “unification” exhibition at the British Library. As these are very delicate documents, there was limited space for people to visit the once-in-a-millennium event so the BL went fully democratic and randomly selected 1,215 attendees from 43,715 applications received from more than 20 countries. After the all too brief three days of unification, the two Magna Cartas that do not live at the British Library permanently returned to their home bases: Salisbury Cathedral and Lincoln Cathedral. Salisbury Cathedral will host an exhibition of its own starting on March 6th. Lincoln Cathedral’s Magna Carta will be on display in a fancy new vault built at Lincoln Castle starting April 1st.

The British Library’s upcoming Magna Carta exhibition runs March 13th through September 1st, 2015. It is sponsored by legal firm Linklaters which has set up a simple and effective Magna Carta viewer where you can zoom in on a legible exemplar and read a transcript or translation of it.

Wolsey’s Angels saved!

Modern(ish), Museums, Renaissance

The Victoria & Albert Museum has successfully raised £5 million to purchase the four bronze angels made to decorate the tomb of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. In early December, the V&A campaign was still a million and a half short of the goal. I was hoping for a viral push thanks to the huge popularity of Wolf Hall on bookshelves, the stage and television, but in the end only £33,000 were raised from online donations. The total raised from the public appeal (online, phone, mail donations and sales of “Save the Wolsey Angels” buttons in the museum gift shop) was a rather meager £87,000. The Wedgwood campaign’s million pounds in public donations infected me with a dangerous and unwarranted optimism, I fear.

With such low figures from the general public, the V&A’s fundraising team must have worked overtime to coax donations out of donors.

The campaign was very much aided by a grant of £2 million from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Art Fund most generously contributed £500,000, and the Friends of the V&A gave £200,000; a further substantial gift was made in memory of Melvin R. Seiden, and many other private individuals and trusts, most notably the Ruddock Foundation for the Arts, also donated.

The National Heritage Memorial Fund and Art Fund donations were already counted in early December, so it seems like those individuals and trusts with the less conspicuous but still significant contributions pulled through in the home stretch. That’s a great thing, because the loss of these statues would have been a damn crime.

Cardinal Wolsey commissioned Florentine sculptor and architect Benedetto da Rovezzano, famous for his religious and funerary sculptures, to design and build his tomb in 1524. The meter-high bronze angels were created to hold candles atop four pillars on the corners of the black marble sarcophagus that would hold the cardinal’s remains. Wolsey’s political downfall in 1529 and death on the way to his treason trial in 1530 left his extensive properties in the hands of King Henry VIII. Henry decided to keep the parts of the tomb that had been finished for his own tomb and commissioned Rovezzano to make him an even fancier one than Wolsey had planned.

It was unfinished at the time of the king’s death in 1547. The remaining Tudor monarchs all made noises about completing their father’s tomb, but it never did happen. Then the Civil War came and the Parliamentarian penchant for converting the trappings of monarchy into cash saw the angels sold off. They disappeared for more than three centuries. We now know that some time during those 330 or so years, all four angels made their way to Harrowden Hall in Northamptonshire. When stately home was acquired by the Wellingborough Golf Club in 1975, the angels were on posts flanking the entrance gates.

Two of the angels were stolen from their perches in 1988, after which the survivors were brought indoors. The stolen ones wound up at a Sotheby’s auction in 1994. Their true history was lost — the catalog described them as bronze angels “in the Renaissance style” — and they sold for £12,000. They were finally returned to their illustriousness by Italian art historian Francesco Caglioti. He found them with a Paris antiques dealer and identified them from a detailed description of them in a 1530 inventory of Wolsey’s property. In 2008, he found their sisters at the Wellingborough Golf Club.

So even though the two Paris angels were stolen property, there was no way for the UK to claim them legally on account of the statute of limitations and conflicting laws in different countries. The Paris dealer offered his pair to the V&A for £2.5 million and the golf club offered its pair for the same price.

Now that justice has been purchased at so small cost, the Wolsey Angels will be taken off public display temporarily. They will be studied, analyzed and conserved and then will find their permanent new home on view with all apposite honors at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Restored Berthouville Treasure at the Getty

Ancient, Museums, Roma, Caput Mundi, Treasures


For the first time since it was discovered in 1830, the entire Berthouville Treasure, a group of exceptional Roman silver objects, has left France and is on display at the Getty Villa in Malibu. Ancient Luxury and the Roman Silver Treasure from Berthouville exhibits the complete 93-piece treasure — which includes a statue of Mercury, elaborately decorated silver pitchers and cups, a repoussé silver jug, plain silver beakers, a spoon collection and a number broken handles, rims and fittings — along with a selection of luxurious jewels, like the eight gold, emerald, pearl and amethyst necklaces of the Treasure of Naix, all on loan from the Département des Monnaies, Médailles et Antiques (the department of coins, medals and antiques) of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

On March 21st, 1830, farmer Prosper Taurin was working his field in Berthouville, near Bernay, Normandy, when his plowshare jammed against an ancient Roman tile. Once dislodged, the tile was found to be protecting a trove of 95 or so Roman silver and gold objects buried only eight inches beneath the soil. Weighing a total of 55 pounds, the stand-out pieces were two statuettes of the god Mercury and about 60 vessels.

Several of the vessels were incscribed with votive dedications to Mercury, including a group of nine ultra deluxe gilded silver vessels — a pair of wine pitchers with scenes from the Trojan War, a pair of drinking cups decorated with scenes of centaurs, a pair of drinking cups with masks, a silver and gold beaker with scenes from the story of Corinth and Isthmia, a large bowl with a central medallion of Omphale and Eros laying on Hercules’ Nemean lion skin and a ladle decorated with Mercury, a goat and a tree — made in the 1st century. These nine pieces all bear the inscription “MERCVRIO AVGVSTO Q DOMITIVS TVTVS EX VOTO,” or “To August Mercury from Quintus Domitius Tutus as vowed,” and are superlatively high quality silver and gold work from 1st century Italy.

Subsequent archaeological excavations of the site in 1861 and 1896 found two temples, a theater and hypocaust-heated rooms: a Gallo-Roman sanctuary built in at least two stages. One of the temples was dedicated to the important Romanized Gallic deity Mercury Canetonensis, the same god name-checked in the vessels’ votive inscriptions. The other was dedicated either to his mother Maia or his wife Rosmerta. The hoard was buried under the brick paving in the gallery of the sanctuary.

Archaeologists did not encounter evidence of a town or cemetery in the vicinity of the sanctuary, so it seems likely to have been a pilgrimage site. The objects date from the 1st to the late 2nd centuries A.D. and are therefore thought to have been buried in the late 2nd, early 3rd century. They could have been buried for their own preservation during turbulent times, but given the context they may have been cached for ritual purposes rather than under extremis.

Taurin put the treasure in the hands of a local nobleman who prevented archaeologists from examining it. An expert from the Louvre and one from the Cabinet des Médailles of the Bibliothèque Royale, today the Département des Monnaies, Médailles et Antiques of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, were allowed access to the group to arrange a sale. The Cabinet acquired the treasure for 15,000 francs, a modest sum even then. At the library in Paris the objects were cleaned and the fragments that could be puzzled back together were. There the Berthouville Treasure remained (with some individual pieces taking occasional short trips elsewhere in France) for 180 years.

In December of 2010, the whole treasure was shipped to the Getty Villa for an extensive program of documentation, analysis, research, cleaning and conservation. Each of the 93 objects (plus four unrelated platters from late antiquity in the Cabinet collection) were photographed and X-rayed to assess their condition and for evidence of how they were manufactured. After a metallurgic study, conservators began to clean the surface of the vessels with simple damp cotton swabs. The grime and dust removal promptly revealed gilding and inscription details that had long been obscured. Further progress was made with mild cleansers and solvents like acetone and ethanol which were able to remove the thick tarnish layers, accretions and corrosion that the 19th century conservation had been unable to budge.

The restoration project took four years to complete and the beautiful results are now on display in California. The exhibition runs at the Getty Villa through August 17th, 2015, after which it returns to Paris whose citoyens will get a chance to see the treasure clean and shiny for the first time.

Here’s a nifty video from the Getty conservation team on how Roman silversmiths would have made the Cup of the Centaurs.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/lrMVA8F-fiY&w=430]